Short films 2: Chants

Oral culture, especially songs, have been one way in which many indigenous peoples have passed on their teachings. The leitmotiv of these short films is actually song, providing a thread of a latent, sometimes unconscious knowledge that emerges and is passed on from generation to generation. Through song, ancestors speak, the rhythms of life are played out, social relations are established and a better future is envisioned.

 

Yaõkwá, Imagem e Memória (Yaõkwá, Image and Memory), Vincent Carelli and Rita Carelli (Video nas Aldeias, Brazil, Enawenê-Nawê people, 2020, 21', Original language with Catalan and Portuguese subtitles)

Video nas Aldeias is an audiovisual project that, for fifteen years, recorded and documented the Yaõkwa, an extensive, multifarious ritual carried out by the Enawenê-Nawê people. In this ritual, the masters of ceremony perform a myriad of chants over seven months in order to maintain the balance of the earthly world as a spiritual world. In this film, fifteen years later, the Enawenê-Nawê rediscover these images and, with them, their deceased relatives, customs that have fallen into disuse and precious ritual songs.

 

Nos os Ka'apor (We the Ka’apor), Carlos Eduardo Magalhães (Laranjeiras Produções, Brazil, Ka'apor people, 2022, 17', Original language)

The struggle for their territory is in the blood of the Ka'apor people, uniting the new and the old, through songs and the ancestral playing of the flute. In a ritual that celebrates the birth of the day, we come into contact with the strength of a warrior people from the Amazon of Maranhão. Mediated by the singer Djuena Tikuna, the film is born with the presence of the struggle for land, the struggle for the territory and young people learning the ancestral Ka'apor culture.

 

El canto del maguaré. Palabra de consejo de Dújdulli (The Song of the Maguaré. Dújdulli's Word of Advice), Vanessa Teteye Mendoza and Edilma Prada Céspedes (Agenda Propia, Colombia, Bora people, 2022, 24', Original language with Catalan subtitles)

Every morning, at the temple or maloka, Dújdulli plays the maguaré (a communication instrument) to guide his people. Along with grandmother María del Pilar Botyay Carvajal and her son Joatan Teteye Botyay, they use songs and dances to sustain and protect the tradition of one of the indigenous peoples to survive the rubber industry.

 

Pë'këya Wa'i Moñe, Ribaldo Piaguaje (Fundación Alianza Ceibo, Ecuador, Siekopai people, Paicoca language, 2024, 7', Original language with Catalan and Spanish subtitles)

A Siekopai elder teaches a young man the territory’s traditional way to fish.

 

Session presented by Miquel Figueras, from the alterNativa and IndiFest team. Subsequent conversation with the sociologist and anthropologist Ignacio Contreras Ilabaca and Miquel Figueras.